Alexis Papachelas
I often wonder how people who lived our lives in the 1910s or the 1930s felt. Did they experience the same uncertainty and fear we feel today, as we sense the foundations of the Western normalcy we had grown accustomed to, perhaps even addicted to, beginning to shake? Or did they carry on enjoying themselves, believing that the next year would be as good as, or better than, the one before? Had they become blasé in the face of violence, extreme division, the trampling of every established value? Or did they explain it all away, telling themselves, “It’s just a passing phase; everything will fix itself and balance out as before”?
We can all hear the rumblings from the “bowels” of the planet, the kind that flatten everything every 50 or 60 years. We see the irrationality, the upheavals, the compromises, but we cannot grasp where it is all heading. We live in a time when there are no voices of recognized authority that you want to hear or read, because when you do, you realize they cannot connect the chaotic dots into a larger picture or predict where today’s turmoil will end.
In the meantime, we have lost, or are losing day-by-day, the wisdom of a generation that had seen and endured it all: wars, dictatorships, hunger. It was no small thing to sit with the members of that departing generation and draw upon their accumulated experience. Not, of course, that my own generation has lived through little. I was reflecting the other day that in just the past fifteen years we have endured a massive economic crisis, the bankruptcy and near-catastrophe of 2015, the tsunami of social media, the coronavirus, a war in Europe, and the Trump phenomenon. Crisis has now become routine.
And yet, we find ourselves today inside a fog. Momentous and inexplicable things are happening, catching us off guard every day, making us angry and afraid. I cannot help but wonder how our counterparts in similar eras felt. Were they sleepwalking, or did they fully grasp that they were living through something terrifying and singular, but simply had no way to respond?
